Vermeer’s Vanishing Act

One of the many clever strokes in Andrew O’Hagan’s 2024 novel Caledonian Road was casting his floundering, public intellectual hero as the author of a best-selling biography of Johannes Vermeer. Given the paucity of facts about Vermeer’s life and the thoroughness with which that paucity has been picked over, knowledgeable readers may have sniffed, but the joke is on the sniffers, since the fictional biography is pointedly a book about an absent subject—an outline around essential emptiness. (Needless to say, there’s a metaphor there.)

The biography’s success nets its author lucrative gigs with fashion houses, which should be preposterous, but the current state of real-world Vermeer fandom makes it believable. Three years after the Rijksmuseum exhibition broke the box office (not a metaphor—the ticketing system collapsed under the demand), you can buy skateboards blazoned with Girl with a Pearl Earring, bathe with rubber ducks sporting her turban, or (like a woman I recently saw sketching at Tate Britain) have her face tattooed on your bicep. At the more cerebral end of the market, recent months have seen the publication of Closer to Vermeer, a Rijksmuseum compendium of serious research papers in the guise of a lovely coffee table book; Vermeer’s Afterlives, Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s account of the painter’s effect on artists and writers from Proust to Richter; and yes, an ambitious new biography, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by the well-known British art historian and broadcaster Andrew Graham-Dixon.

What is it about Vermeer? There are plenty of other entrancing Dutch Golden Age painters out there: Pieter de Hooch’s playful children are backlit delights; Caspar Netscher’s The Lace Maker is a miracle of quiet concentration. There’s Rembrandt, for goodness’ sake. But nobody is selling baseball caps with Netscher’s Lace Maker on them. And nobody carries on about a Sphinx of Leiden or The Hague or Amsterdam the way they do about the Sphinx of Delft.

The magic of Vermeer resides in the paintings—their peculiar way of being at once sociable and silent, of making the fall of light feel both transcendent and palpable. But the mystique of Vermeer—the sphinxiness first ascribed to him in 1858 by the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger—has much to do with the two centuries of obscurity between his death in 1675 and his rediscovery. Having come upon the View of Delft in The Hague’s Mauritshuis while in political exile from his native France, Thoré-Bürger adopted the role of obsessive detective, seeking to learn who the artist was and what else he had made: “To see one picture by van der Meer, I traveled hundreds of miles: to obtain a photograph of another van der Meer, I was madly extravagant.” Yeazell opens her book with his claim “This Vermeer has driven us crazy. But we have revived him.”

Most of those rediscovered Vermeers were hiding in plain sight but misattributed to other artists. One critical clue in sorting this out was the 1696 auction listing of twenty-one paintings by “J. vander Meer van Delft” from the estate of a man named Jacob Dissius. Some of its terse descriptions were easily paired to known works (“the town of Delft seen in perspective from the south”). Some were less helpful (“a view of some house”), and a couple have never found a match. (If you should happen upon a seventeenth-century canvas of “a gentleman washing his hands, in a perspectival room, with figures, artful and rare,” contact the authorities.)

Thoré-Bürger was overly optimistic in many of his attributions, but he was right enough to provide modern audiences with a first sense of Vermeer not merely as the equal of better-remembered peers but as qualitatively distinct. Abjuring the shadowy drama of Rembrandt, the slapstick of Jan Steen, and the coziness of de Hooch, Vermeer’s pictures were quietly perplexing—the action stilled, the narratives incomplete. Many genre paintings look like freeze-frames from a stage play—the actors explicit in their gestures, comedic attitudes, or shows of affection. Vermeer’s always seem to be waiting for their lines.

His disregard for obvious plots was, Yeazell points out, one of the things that made Vermeer feel “modern” in the late nineteenth century. To artists disenchanted with the narrative drudgery of academic painting, Vermeer’s preference for seemingly ordinary moments resonated, as did his fascination with light and his sometimes abrupt brushwork. Connections were drawn between Vermeer and Impressionism, Vermeer and Whistler, Vermeer and Manet. People took note of what looked like proto-photographic effects in certain paintings—the oversize glints on reflective surfaces, the perceptually strange foreshortening, the way things move in and out of focus—as with the pile of red threads in the foreground of Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, which verges on abstraction. Yeazell cites W. Somerset Maugham’s alter ego in Of Human Bondage (1915), Philip Carey, pronouncing Vermeer “the one old master who painted like a modern.”

She also documents a lesser-known “generational phenomenon” of painters who took Vermeer as a model for retreat from the modern world. The clothing worn by their female subjects might be contemporary, but their activities might be seventeenth century: reading, sewing, fingering keyboards in beautifully lit rooms. The American Impressionist Thomas Dewing collected Vermeerish props like a chair with lion’s-head finials; others arranged antique crockery or piled textiles on foreground tables. Of telephones, radios, or electric lights, however, there is no sign, and the pictures feel not so much transcendent as claustrophobic. The Danes Vilhelm Hammershøi and Peter Ilsted engaged in less interior decor cosplay but convey their own airless Nordic noir.

What is interesting about these works is how they illuminate the original. Their preference for stasis, for example, makes one notice Vermeer’s gift for incipient action—the look of a decision about to be made, an event about to happen. We are alerted to the way he seems to discover the world afresh on every canvas, rather than reshaping it as something already seen on a museum wall. (One great exception, Yeazell points out, is Gerhard Richter’s effulgent portrait of his wife reading. Richter acknowledges longing to paint like Vermeer, but here as elsewhere he was seeking his own new answers to the question of how looking works.)

By the mid-twentieth century, Vermeer was enough of a trope that imitation was beside the point. For Joseph Cornell, placing a cutout of Girl with a Pearl Earring in his 1952 box Grand Hôtel Bon Port was a way of talking about longing and loss. For Salvador Dalí, painting a copy of Vermeer’s Lacemaker from large reproductions propped in the rhino enclosure of a zoo was a way of talking about Dalí. Filmmakers quoted Vermeer’s fall of light as a way to still time. Novelists worked to fill his seductive silences with servant girl romances and encrypted desire. Poets attached themselves in such numbers that Jane Shore titled a 2023 poem “I Am Sick of Reading Poems About Paintings by Vermeer.”

Art historians too were keen to make Vermeer their own. Yeazell takes us on a tour of the many academic trends that have been brought to bear, beginning with the connoisseurship required to distinguish Vermeers from not-Vermeers. (One chapter is given over to the Han van Meegeren forgeries, connoisseurship’s great comeuppance.) Having largely solved the question of what Vermeer painted, scholars turned to the question of what he meant.

Iconographers analyzed the maps and paintings in his pictures for covert messages; they scoured Dutch emblem books (printed compilations of moralizing memes) for signposts his original audience might have recognized. But endless questions remained: Was the presence of a map predating the Dutch Republic a political gesture, and if so, pro or con? Was the girl smiling demurely at a soldier an image of vice or virtue? And what on earth was up with the eye-rolling, snake-squishing, breast-clutching woman in Allegory of the Catholic Faith? Researchers have now examined the economy in which Vermeer operated, the sources of his pigments, the behavior of his sociopathic brother-in-law, the interior layouts of the buildings he might have called home. Yet 394 years after his (Protestant) baptism, Johannes Vermeer of Delft remains an enigma wrapped in a slit-sleeve doublet (if indeed the fancy-pants guy with his back to us in The Art of Painting is a self-effacing self-portrait, as many believe).

Maddeningly—or conveniently, depending on your agenda—the original documents in the case are few and far between: we have records of his baptism, his marriage, his guild membership, his death, and the financial difficulties faced by his widow and eleven surviving children. We know he was admired in his lifetime thanks to mentions by a couple of art-savvy travelers to Delft and a poem naming him as a phoenix risen from the ashes of the gunpowder magazine explosion that killed the painter Carel Fabritius. But we have no writings from his hand, no drawings, no account of his training. We don’t know his personality, his politics, or his religious leanings. Baptized in the Dutch Reformed church, he married into a Catholic family, lived a few doors down from a Jesuit mission, and left behind children with names like Ignatius and Franciscus.

Such slim biographical pickings are not unusual. John Michael Montias, the Yale economist whose research in the 1970s and 1980s did much to reconstruct the world around the artist, observed that lasting records usually involve brushes with authority—births, deaths, criminal proceedings. Graham-Dixon, who previously wrote a well-received biography of the brawling, homicidal Caravaggio, describes Vermeer’s thin file as the price of a “peaceable and law-abiding life.” But in this case, the sparseness of the evidence has combined with the ambiguity of the pictures to produce a persistent faith that somewhere there is a secret key that will unlock them both.

In 2001 Philip Steadman’s Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces argued that Vermeer used a closet-size camera obscura to compose many of his interior paintings. In 2009 Benjamin Binstock’s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice dismissed the iconographers and “camera literalists,” and instead saw the pictures as enacting familial dramas and proposed that up to a sixth of the artist’s oeuvre was actually the work of his oldest daughter. Since family members, unlike apprentices, were not registered with the guild, she could have trained with and assisted her father while leaving no record. More recently (and less sensationally) the Rijksmuseum curator Gregor J.M. Weber’s Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection proposed that Vermeer had been not a Catholic convert of convenience, as many have suggested, but a true believer, and speculated that he may have encountered (or even acquired) a desktop camera obscura through the Jesuits down the block.

None of these theories has proved transformative, though bits and pieces of them have become accepted. Many specialists think it possible that Vermeer witnessed some form of projected images and was entranced enough to imitate the effect, but inventories show no such equipment in his possession, and experiments reported in Closer to Vermeer show that seventeenth-century lenses weren’t up to the task Steadman proposed. In 2022 new scientific analyses prompted the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., to downgrade its peculiar Girl with a Flute to “studio of Johannes Vermeer,” lending potential support to Binstock’s claim of familial authorship. But the Rijksmuseum still maintains that Flute is from the master’s own hand (albeit on a bad day), and no other paintings have been shown to share the oddities that called Flute into question.

For those with a taste for such things, the scientific papers in Closer to Vermeer are an enjoyable antidote to the full-throttle imaginings of much Vermeer literature. Conservators are by nature conservative: they explain the wondrous analytic abilities of the tools at their disposal—an alphabet soup of imaging tech (MA-XRF, MA-XRPD, RIS, FTIR, GC-MS)—and the limitations of those tools. They qualify their deductions with care. Computer-assisted weave maps of Vermeer canvases, for example, can tell us which paintings were cut from the same cloth and even where on the bolt the cut was made. They can suggest (not prove) which paintings may have been (not were) made around the same time. Refreshingly, the authors infer from this not a whit of personal meaning.

Andrew Graham-Dixon is not a conservator but a historian with a gift for making serious art accessible without dumbing it down. He is also the latest in the Thoré-Bürger mode to be driven crazy by Vermeer and to claim to have resurrected him in new ways. Promising a “disconcertingly new” account of the artist’s life, art, and intentions, his book turns on the biggest oddity in Vermeer’s paper trail: that roughly half of Vermeer’s estimated lifetime output belonged to a single family. Montias discovered that Jacob Dissius (the owner of those twenty-one auctioned works) was the son-in-law of a Delft couple, Pieter van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, who knew Vermeer. It now seems clear that Maria was the force behind their art collection (her will referred to “my” paintings, not “ours”) and was thus “the only person in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic who is known to have collected half of any artist’s oeuvre,” Piet Bakker and Judith Noorman write in Closer to Vermeer. Maria also arranged to leave the painter a bequest, a stipulation for which Montias could find no precedent.

What was behind this singular relationship? To reach his answer Graham-Dixon takes us back to the founding of the Protestant Dutch Republic, some fifty years before Vermeer was born. A novel political experiment (which most of Europe assumed would fail), it was the result of rebellion against decades of brutal Spanish rule during which Dutch civilians were repeatedly massacred for their politics, religious convictions, or mere presence in the wrong town. The republic’s own internal struggles could also turn bloody, but on questions of religious orthodoxy the state blew hot and cold. The only legally sanctioned church was Dutch Reformed, but other faiths were tolerated in a typically Dutch way: their places of worship could not advertise—no spires or bell towers—though they might be substantial buildings. (Delft’s “hidden” Jesuit church could seat seven hundred.) There were Catholics, Lutherans, and Mennonites, there were Remonstrants, who denied predestination and held that salvation could be secured through faith and good deeds, and there were the leaderless Collegiants, a big tent movement in which Spinozan rationalism jostled with mystical modes, violence was condemned, even Catholics were welcome, and women’s voices were valued as much as men’s. (It is a testament to Graham-Dixon’s skills as a writer that he manages to make all this not only comprehensible but interesting.)

Having laid the ground, Graham-Dixon builds a case for Vermeer family connections to the Remonstrants: the painter’s mother had worked for a family related to the movement’s founder; a younger member of that family later loaned Vermeer money. For a while Vermeer’s parents lived close to the local Remonstrant preacher Johannes Taurinus, for whom the painter might have been named. (The highfalutin “Johannes” was an outlier in a world full of simple “Jans.”) Graham-Dixon then does the same for Vermeer’s patrons, identifying Remonstrant sympathies in the Van Ruijven family tree and arguing that de Knuijt at least was involved with the still more radical Collegiants.

For proof he has to lean on some pretty slim reeds (that the Van Ruijvens chose a notary whose first cousin was the foremost Collegiant; that Vermeer’s painting The Little Street may show the edge of the Van Ruijven house and a Remonstrant church behind it). But slim reeds are pretty much all we have with Vermeer, and Graham-Dixon weaves them together artfully to support his theory that not only did painter and patron share the same religious beliefs, but—drumroll here—the paintings Vermeer provided de Knuijt were designed for, and employed in, Collegiant worship. Vermeer’s Woman with a Balance? A depiction of private spiritual contemplation. The Milkmaid? An instance of the evangelical life, offering physical and spiritual succor. A Maid Asleep? A portrait of de Knuijt experiencing a religious vision (“Has the spirit of the Lord dwelt with her and held communion with her?” he asks). Like others before him, Graham-Dixon sees God in Vermeer’s light: what looks like filtered sunshine is actually “the indwelling light of the soul.”

The line he draws between Collegiant thought and Vermeer feels right. Looking at the rapt expression of Woman with a Pearl Necklace, one can easily imagine her listening to the still, small voice of the eternal. When he writes about the peaceful Apocalypse imagined by some Collegiants—an earthly paradise that might “sneak up on the world without the world noticing”—Vermeer’s pictures flood to mind. It is appealing to think that this most tender and attentive of painters chose a creed that valued peace over conflict, saw women and men as equals, and had faith in the possibility of transcendence right here, in the world of tables and chairs and plain plaster walls.

For a hundred years, Vermeer has been to art history what the Mirror of Erised was to young wizards at Hogwarts, showing each viewer what he or she longs to see. Thoré-Bürger, in exile from an autocratic emperor, discovered a master of “l’art pour l’homme.” Vermeer’s turn-of-the-century imitators found serene distance from a jangly new technological world. Steadman, a postwar architect, saw a technologically curious experimentalist. And now, as venality and performative violence deform our institutions and ethics, Graham-Dixon recognizes Vermeer as “one of a chosen few who built the values on which a tolerant and liberal civilization, our own even, might be based.”

Precisely because the theory suits so neatly our current needs, a little skepticism is in order. How much weight can Graham-Dixon’s data points bear? If you read fast enough, you might be able to whiz, Roadrunner style, over the gaps in the record, but as the book progresses it’s hard not to notice how quickly suppositions become facts onto which further suppositions are stacked. Eventually the argument starts to feel like a cross between a Jenga tower and a Möbius strip. Since there is no solid documentation for de Knuijt’s religious behavior, “Maria’s Collegiant activities must be inferred from the internal evidence of Vermeer’s paintings.” And since there are no known Collegiant paintings, the Collegiant pictorial agenda is derived from the Vermeer paintings.

“In almost no case,” Graham-Dixon warns us, “does my account of a given picture match up with anything previously written about it.” Those accounts go from fairly persuasive (the sky in View of Delft is numinous enough to double as the kingdom of heaven), to maybe if you squint (the spiritual reckoning of Maid Asleep), to bizarre. “We know the lacemaker is pregnant,” he claims, because the out-of-focus pile of red threads in the foreground is actually “the image of a woman’s womb, veins and arteries pulsing with blood.” (While there is a naughty Dutch pun to do with pin cushions, the threads-as-uterus idea indeed has no precedent.)

His hottest take is the identification of Girl with a Pearl Earring as a portrait of Vermeer’s patrons’ twelve-year-old daughter, Magdalena (later the wife of Jacob Dissius), in the guise of Mary Magdalene. The famously enigmatic expression that greets the viewer is, he explains, that of the Magdalene in the moment before recognizing Jesus risen from the tomb. Vermeer-heads are likely to object on two grounds: first, the picture was described as a tronie (an anonymous face) in the Dissius sale—an odd error if it depicted Dissius’s wife; and second, treating the viewer as a stand-in for the resurrected Christ seems theologically dicey.

This is nitpicky stuff, however, compared with the contradictions at the heart of his story. Many observers have assumed that, having married a Catholic bride in a Catholic church and lived with her and their Catholic children in a Catholic neighborhood, Vermeer had converted, either out of love or conviction. Graham-Dixon’s Vermeer, however, seems to despise the Catholic faith—in one passage the painter is imagined making works for his mother-in-law’s kitchen chapel “through gritted teeth.” The man who, we are told, embraced a faith based on tolerance and honesty is thus also a man who lived his life (and took vows) with fingers crossed behind his back. And while Graham-Dixon is not the first to depict Vermeer’s mother-in-law as a controlling harridan (though she seems to have supported the painter and his brood), he further works to separate Vermeer from the rest of his family, proposing that those many children had been his wife’s “decision” (how this would have been accomplished is not explained). Thus the creator of some of the world’s most transcendent visions of women at home is portrayed as a man existentially alienated from the women with whom he lived.

The other big poser is why Collegiants, who rejected even the streamlined, whitewashed spectacle of Calvinist churches, would have chosen to commission exquisitely crafted, luminously beautiful oil paintings for veneration—a practice smacking loudly of the Romish customs that had occasioned those imaginary gritted teeth. At one point Graham-Dixon proposes that three Vermeer paintings described in 1683 as being in “boxes” were meant to be opened and closed in the manner of Catholic altarpieces.

What is perplexing is that these overreaches seem so unnecessary. Given Collegiant tolerance, Vermeer could have been a Collegiant and a Catholic and a contented paterfamilias. The problem isn’t with Graham-Dixon’s theory. It’s with the assertion of certainty—the reduction of complexity to something that opens with a single key. This is the great paradox of Vermeer’s afterlife: so many smart, capable, inquisitive writers, smitten with the pictures’ elusiveness, working so hard to wrestle that elusiveness into submission.

“Many people,” Graham-Dixon writes of the paintings, “have fallen under their spell, and have wondered what secrets they might hold.” But what if there are no secrets? No riddle to solve, no hidden meanings, covert technologies, arcane symbolism, familial psychodrama, concealed religious convictions? Now that we can see beneath the surfaces of the paintings, we know how carefully Vermeer nudged them toward visual clarity and narrative ambiguity. He painted out the man and dog that once stood behind the sleeping maid, obliterating the easy story line. Woman with a Balance was long read as warning against vanity until imaging proved the pans of her scale to be empty. What keeps us stuck in front of Vermeer paintings for so long is as much about what is withheld as it is about what is shown. Vermeer doesn’t tell us what to think, or even really what was going on—again and again he arranges things so you cannot know.

Perhaps this ambiguity is not a problem to be remedied but a quality to be celebrated, an invitation to take the world as it comes, to recognize how, with small bits of tweaking, we can learn to see the small and local as one with something larger. Graham-Dixon himself writes beautifully about the essential absence of Vermeer: “He is like the visitor in the painting of the woman sleeping, who has just pushed back his chair and gone somewhere else…. However close we come to him, he has always left the room by the time we get there.” His absence isn’t a void awaiting meaning but a form of meaning in itself.

In Caledonian Road, O’Hagan tells us that the fictional Vermeer biography “appeared to its many readers to argue that unknowability is an essential feature of the artistic life, and perhaps of all lives.” But O’Hagan chooses not to tell us whether this is what its author intended.